Wang's Magnificent Sinker

With my new rotation in Structure Credit starting in less than 2 weeks, my manager has relieved me of my daily responsibilities. Instead, I am to focus on regression testing in preparation for a major system upgrade next month and to concentrate on documenting and refining existing procedures and reports that I’ve come into contact with over the last year. It’s a rather boring role, really – writing procedures, implementing new macros, building spreadsheets, etc. And after 7-hours of them your brain turns into this jelly/glue/sulfuric dust mixture. So in a mighty effort to resuscitate myself, here’s a brief musing on Chien-Ming Wang’s pitching repertoire.

Chien-Ming Wang is a power sinkerball pitcher. By “power” I mean his fastball usually sits in the mid 90’s, and his sinker in the low 90’s. We often marvel at young pitchers who can throw fastballs that clock at 96, 98, even 100 mph (refer to affectionately by baseball people as “heat”.) But to quote Bill James (the father of modern sabermetrics), “speed for a pitcher is like looks for a girlfriend. It is meaningful but not determinative.” So a fastball pitcher, to be effective on the big-league level, must have more than just speed. He has to either develop an off-speed pitch (usually a change-up) to mix-in with his fastball, or to incorporate movements into his fastball. Wang's sinker is a fastball that moves. The ball is released with an over-the-top, then outside-in, flip of the wrist. It is gripped along the the two seams, and released as hard as possible.

So why is it so hard to hit, you asked? Well, Wang's pitch is not hard to hit, as evidenced by his low strike-out count. However, it's devilishly hard to hit his pitches well on a consistent basis. His sinker "explodes" in on the hands. The bottom of the ball falls out, and at times it seemed as if batters are having a very difficult time lifting the ball up out of the infield. When you combine a late-action 94mph sinker with a 96mph rising fastball and good controls, you have yourself a very effective ground-ball machine in Chien-Ming Wang.

And that concluded our little baseball musing of the day. Thank you all very much for staying with me.

"Strikeouts are boring - besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls. More democratic."
~From the movie Bull Durham